Luminance HDR 2.1.0 sees the light, the dark and the inbetween

Luminance HDR, a high dynamic range imaging application for Windows, Linux and Mac got another update with fixes and some nice new features.

We shot a very short screencast to demonstrate most important changes in this version:

In general these are rather nice improvements, and there are more, less significant changes. For example, the internal batch processing tool now reads output size from project files (before it always rendered full-size pictures).

At the same time there are few annoying bugs and imperfections, like not reading unicode file paths correctly. There is some ongoing work regarding color management support, but Luminance HDR doesn't even yet take system display ICC profile into consideration. We went ahead and asked Davide Anastasia, the current project's maintainer, about his primary objectives. Here is what he told us:

I think Luminance needs other basic improvements before going into the color correction: a better tonemapping process, clear indication of the status of every operation and a better tonemapping settings panel. I'm planning to both change layout of UI of that panel and introduce human readable labels.

Judging by UI changes in 2.1.0, Davide is quite serious about streamlining user experience. Some past subjectively questionable experiments with UI have been removed, and the tabbed UI, for instance, is clearly a winner. Making tonemapping options understandable by mere mortals will be quite a challenge, hopefully the new team will succeed at it.

Luminance HDR is available as source code, builds for Windows and Mac, as well as RPM packages for Fedora.